Bryan Northup

This work responds to human dependence on a uniquely modern material: plastic. Using collected single-use plastic, environmental artist Bryan Northup attempts to blur the lines between appetizing consumables, biological dissection and everyday waste to explore layers of meaning in an age where plastics have saturated our environment and penetrated our species—both biologically and culturally—to the cellular level. ‘You Can’t Put it Back in the Box’ is an ever-growing installation. Created intuitively, these dioramas are made of found plastic and styrofoam material, depicting abstracted glimpses of microscopic cell interactions, in an attempt to imagine how these very plastics are interacting with living systems at the deepest level.

The work strives to render organic forms and textures that allude to perishables likely to decay, but will never decompose. With this work, Northup hopes to record a material fingerprint, a time capsule, that implicates contemporary social values and attitudes surrounding environmental conservation, consumption, waste and how these affect our own bodies.